This document discusses the options available to a mining company regarding the development of a property containing mineral ore deposits. There is uncertainty around both the future price of ore and the quantity of ore in the ground. The company has two options: immediately develop the mine or defer development in hopes that future ore prices will be higher. Learning more about the ore quantity through exploratory development could help optimize this decision but also limits the option to defer. The document analyzes these tradeoffs and concludes that a small exploratory investment to gain more information about the ore quantity would modestly improve the project's value by informing the appropriate scale of mining infrastructure.

1. CASE STUDY : MINING ORE

2.  Mining companies have to decide when to develop the properties they own
 Such decisions often involve a combination of options: the option to learn
about the quantity of ore present underground and the option to defer
development until ore prices are favorable.
 These two options frequently conflicts
1. Option 1: Immediate development sacrifices the deferral option, but provides
information on the quantity of ore available
2. Option 2:Deferring development allows the owner to wait until the price of ore
is high enough to ensure profitability, but provides no information on the
quantity of ore.
 At times, partial or exploratory development, allowing a company to learn
something about its holdings while preserving the ability to hold back actual
production until prices improve, may be a reasonable compromise.

3.  When learning options arise ?
 when a company can speed up the arrival of important information by making an
investment. As always, an option arises only if the information can modify future
investment decisions.
 If a company owns the right to mine land for mineral ore, it must decide whether to
develop the property immediately or defer development in the hope that the price
of the ore will rise.
 Imagine that at the current price, the mine is close to breakeven, and the only
uncertainty is the price of the ore when sold. Historically, prices have followed a
random walk driƒting upward over time. If the company knew that this trend would
continue, it would decide to defer development until the price rose far enough to
make mining clearly profitable.
 It holds a valuable option: that of deferring the opening of the mine. Real option
theory can be used to determine the best time to exercise the option

4.  Example:
 suppose the company thinks that the deposit holds a million tons of ore. It estimates
that for an initial cost of $100 million, it can build an infrastructure capable of mining
100,000 tons a year for a decade. Extraction and processing will cost $200 a ton, and
current spot and futures market prices indicate that a decade’s worth of ore production
can be sold for a locked-in rate of $360 a ton. Thus, with a weighted average capital cost
of 10 percent, the project has an estimated NPV of minus $2 million – a net loss.
 Look at it another way .The price of ore is volatile, and the company does not have to
develop the mine immediately; instead,it can wait for a year and see if prices rise.
 If they go up to $400 a ton, the project will have an NPV of $21 million, even factoring in
the years delayin cashflows .If prices fall to $320 a ton, the company can choose not to
open the mine, thus reaping an NPV of zero. Acting on realistic assumptions, we can
combine these numbers into an expected NPV of$10.5million,which means that the
company should defer the decision for a year and then reconsider it. Should it be
deferred for10years,the expected NPV rise seven higher,to $30million ,since there is a
good chance that ore prices will rise above $400 at on in the course of a decade.

5.  Now suppose that the quantity of ore in the mine is also uncertain. There is a 50/50 chance of
its holding 0.5 million or 1.5 million tons. The expected quantity is thus still a million tons.
 If the deposits contain only 0.5 million tons of ore, an infrastructure costing $50 million would
be suƒficient to extract it in 10 years. If the deposits contain 1.5 million tons, a larger
infrastructure costing $150 million would be needed to handle the ore over a decade. A too
small infrastructure delays the extraction of the ore; a too large one is a waste of money,
although it accelerates the rate of production.
INFRASTRUCTURE
INVESTEMENT DECISION
$50 MILLION
1.5
0.5
$150MILLION
1.5
0.5
36
15
44
3
NPV
25.5
23.5

6.  there is a learning option –
1. $1 million the company can give itself a 90 percent chance of learning how much ore the site
contains. In this event, learning does not conflict with deferral.
2. If the company finds out that there is likely to be a lot of ore, it invests in the larger
infrastructure for an expected NPV of $39.9 million; if it learns that there is likely to be only a
little ore, it builds the smaller infrastructure for an expected NPV of $17.1 million. The overall
expected NPV is $28.5 million, or $27.5 million aƒter the $1 million cost of testing has been
deducted. Thus it pays to learn. The company can improve the project’s overall NPV by
spending money up front to find out how much ore there really is.
3. ; if acquiring knowledge cost more than $3 million, the company would be better oƒf
investing in the smaller infrastructure without making an eƒfort to learn how much ore it has.
The benefit is modest because the smaller infrastructure does not have much of a downside,
even if the quantity of ore turns out to be large.
4. the benefit of learning is not very great.